My collection of free or low-cost, "small" games, including indie games. These are rated on their merits as small, cheap games, rather than being compared to bigger AAA titles (most would be scarcely capable of managing a 3-star rating when ranked there). Bonus points go to games that bypass their low budget by just being cleverly designed, introducing innovative mechanics, or telling a powerful story.
Five Stars: 3
Four Stars: 7
Three Stars: 6
Two Stars: 7
One Star: 1
Alien Swarm combines many of my favourite game elements: a challenging, cooperative campaign broken up into short missions, featuring customizable loadouts and a meaningful progression of upgrades. Five Stars.
It's impressive that a game about goo can resonate with me on the emotional level that this one does. The puzzles are clever and widely varied, yet almost all are founded in the simple core mechanic of building goo structures. And, once you run out of puzzles, there's still the matter of testing your architectural skills with the leftover gooballs. The soundtrack is awesome, too. Five Stars.
This is what Lego-brand games ought to be. Survival mode proper abandons you in a largely unforgiving wilderness, managing the resources from your immediate environment to protect yourself against the constant threat of monsters while trying to cobble together some kind of satisfying existence. It's addictive in the extreme and there is a genuine sense of accomplishment and achievement whenever you finish a project. Five Stars.
I never get tired of reciting this title. PAA doesn't grab my interest much strictly as an RPG (functionally turn-based combat, fairly generic character progression, etc), but I adore the story, setting and characters. Four Stars.
The difficulty level, vast array of upgrades, and wide variety of enemies is more than a little overwhelming, but this game is still a blast to play. It's tower defense without paths or nodes (i.e., as it should be) and it's RTS where turtling is the only strategy (i.e., the way I wish it would be). Four Stars.
An improvement upon Shadowgrounds in almost every way: The voice acting has improved, characters are better characterized, the shielded enemies are gone, the RPG mechanics have been ramped up, and the weapons are divided among three characters so as to keep things varied and interesting while you switch between roles. The story is still unremarkable, but is no longer a hindrance to the overall experience. Four Stars.
Limbo is masterful. The relentlessly oppressive nature of the visuals and events are engaging and moving, and the puzzles are equally interesting. The themes become a little more muddled and the puzzles more finicky and timing-dependent toward the latter half of the game, but it is still a powerful, well-crafted game. Four Stars.
I would not have gambled that slider puzzles could be so incredibly engaging and entertaining, but here I am, wholly engaged and entertained. I'm guessing this has much to do with the World-of-Goo-like approach of a simple mechanic spun out to many complex situations. All I wish it had was a UGC system. Four Stars.
As a God game, From Dust would be pathetic. As a terrain-manipulation puzzle game, however, it is impeccable. Like many a good puzzle game, From Dust uses a simple mechanic is spun out in a myriad of interesting ways, without ever losing it's intuitive simplicity. It's one crippling drawback is the horrid control scheme, although this is manageable and somewhat forgivable. Four Stars.
I haven't finished Lugaru, but I can guess where it's headed. The gameplay doesn't seem to change much from level to level, but it has plenty of depth, so there's no real issue. Lugaru's context sensitive inputs create elegant melee combat that doesn't require extensive memorization of button sequences, so I'm very pleased. Four Stars.
Lovely visuals and music, enjoyable puzzles and powers, and a charming, quaint story. The puzzle difficulty seems well tuned, rarely frustrating and perhaps even a bit too easy - most of the time, anyway, the final level in particular is quite unexpectedly difficult. Serves as a good baseline for expectations of a platform-puzzler. Three Stars.
I don't know what to say about Aquaria except that it was fun. The song mechanics strike me as very original, and though I haven't really played any other games of this genre, I think Aquaria was a good introduction. On the downside, the amount of time and mental presence required for traveling from place to place is a bit of a pain. Three Stars.
I can't help but feel that this game was hyped up a little more than it necessarily deserved. The "story" is ambiguous to the point of impenetrability, so I ceased caring about it not after long. The puzzles, however, are challenging and worthwhile if you have the admittedly significant patience to solve them. Three Stars.
Shadowgrounds is a game of highs and lows. The story, writing, and acting are laughably bad, the level design can easily screw you out of resources, some encounters (particularly those involving the shielded enemies) are excessively demanding, and it uses the obsolete lives system for no reason. That said, there's a nice array of weaponry, the enemies are varied and creative, and most encounters are engaging and entertaining. Three Stars.
I suppose I was expecting, somehow, for this title to include a little more game-developing, but that aspect is mostly represented by icons popping up above employees' heads. It's a simple, easy, competent tycoon game, loaded with gaming references and little else. Three Stars.
Osmos is both simple, intuitive, elegant and entertaining, but the difficulty ramps up quickly and completing a level doesn't always feel as rewarding as it should, as it's sometimes quite anticlimactic. A good game for killing idle time. Three Stars.
Too short, too simple and easy. Scribblenauts Remix certainly is an impressive feat (although I managed to disappoint myself by foiling it's dictionary on several occasions), but it never really seems to amount to anything. The capacity to generate ANYTHING, while cool, never seems to actually be necessary to complete the challenges. Two Stars.
Taken strictly as a game, I would have to say Trauma is pretty awful (and frustrating, if you're a completionist), but it is clearly banking on the poetry of its photograph-like visuals and narrator's fragmented memories, which, to be fair, are strong enough to evoke some kind of emotional response, especially if you can relate to some of the anecdotes and ideas. That said, I still can't give it a solid recommendation, because it ultimately came across as fairly pretentious: I was never able to pry a deeper sense of meaning from the game. Two Stars.
I gave up on Penumbra around the time I encountered a dog that I was expected to defeat in melee combat (and could not avoid). Numerous retries all ended with me dead by consequence of the unutterably terrible combat. Penumbra is a masterfully atmospheric and genuinely terrifying horror game, and I really wanted to see it through, but all fear has been converted into sheer frustration caused by these awful controls. Two Stars.
Make no mistake, gravity control is a cool mechanic to add to a platform game, but AYIM is mostly a disappointment. In spite of the unique visuals, there's no story to speak of, plus the difficulty fluctuates pretty drastically and the controls feel imprecise. Overall, it is too unremarkable to be worth the trouble. Two Stars.
Samorost 2 improves upon the standard adventure game formula in three ways. First, there is no inventory screen, so the puzzles are all neatly self-contained and there's less rubbing together of random objects. Second, you can interact with objects without the main character having to actually be near them, so there's no wasted time traveling about the screens. Third, it's incredibly short, so the total duration of adventure game bullshit is also short. Two Stars.
It seems like the designers of Machinarium have deliberately done everything in their power to make this game frustrating instead of fun. Most of the game consists of randomly clicking around, watching slow, unskippable animations until you happen to bump up against the correct object to make the game move forward. A few self-contained puzzles, often serving as locks, are genuinely enjoyable, but mostly it's just boring and random. Two Stars.
Gravity reversal is a cool concept for a platformer, and VVVVVV does more with this gimmick than And Yet It Moves did, but VVVVVV is decidedly masocore. Frequent checkpoints and clear goals ease the frustration of constant failure, but one way or another, there is constant failure, and it is frustrating. Two Stars.
Fuck Gish. Fuck it's goddamn physics that don't respond the same way even when I can't discern what I'm doing differently, fuck it's archaically brutal use of a "lives" system, fuck it's punishing level design that forces you to start over and over and over because you didn't psychically know what asshole pit of lava or falling block from the ceiling or enemy appearing out of nowhere was going to hit you next. This is not so much a game as a mode of punishment. One Star.
Rating pending. So far: Memorizing button combos can be a pain, but you can also opt to just find the one or two combinations that are needed for a given situation and spam them until the cows come home. You'll die frequently, regardless, so I suggest playing with a friend such that you can res one another. My only playmate thus far has been my quick-to-anger ladyfriend, so I'm not sure I'm yet getting the best Magicka experience that I could be.
Rating Pending: The introduction to this game states that it's not about finding just any solution, but rather the MOST AWESOME solution. This is because simple solutions are frequently really easy - and there isn't much reason to do anything awesome unless you're feeling creative.
Rating Pending: Having some trouble getting my mouse calibrated to play this, between the in-game sensitivity adjustor and my own mouse's DPI switcher I'm sure I'll eventually get it to a point where I can control the little bastard effectively.
Cortex Command is finally finished, but I haven't played it since it was a busted, incomplete piece of shit. I'm excited to see what it's become, though, because it had a lot of promise in spite of being a total wreck.
Unplayed.
Unplayed.
Unplayed.
Rating Pending: I'm massively disappointed by the fact that the 'chem' in spacechem is little more than a random coat of paint over what is actually a robot programming game. That said, the robot programming game is fucking rad.
Unreleased.
Yay, I got this now. I'll play it so that I can then play ep3!
Got this before getting Ep2. Probably not going to play it until after I do the prior game.
Don't know if this really belongs here, or if the nature of it's overarching story should place it over on the AAA list. Time will tell - but it's got the production values of a real $50 game.
Unplayed. Actually I tried about 5 minutes of this... it looks pretty intense. Here's hoping it's within my skills to even finish this game, otherwise we may have another Gish on our hands.
Rating Pending. I'm really enjoying Bastion - the RPG elements of the game are all quite meaningful, the combat is less button-mashey than I normally anticipate for a game of this type, and, of course, the sexy narrator and music are a delight.
